Silicon Labs Has Cash ‘Ability’ to Stay ‘Active’ on IoT ‘M&A Front,’ Says CEO
In Tyson Tuttle’s six years as Silicon Labs CEO, “I think we’ve done seven acquisitions, all around IoT,” he told a Stifel investment conference Wednesday. The Z-Wave buy from Sigma Designs that Silicon Labs completed in April for $240 million…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
in cash (see 1804180064) “was the largest one that we’ve done,” said Tuttle. Like the six previous acquisitions under his watch, Silicon Labs pursued Z-Wave with the purpose of “building up this core platform around IoT,” he said. “That’s been, I think, a very successful set of acquisitions, and we’re starting to see the results of that in the growth of the IoT business.” After the Z-Wave buy, “we have about $525 million in the bank” and about $300 million in available credit, “and so we have the ability to continue to be active on the M&A front,” said Tuttle. In any new acquisition targets, “we’ll continue to focus on the IoT area, and if there’s something that makes sense there, we certainly have the ability to go for it,” he said. “But it has to be culturally aligned, strategically aligned, and it needs to be accretive to the bottom line at the same time.”